Whenever people talk about entrepreneurship, they usually discuss groundbreaking businesses. You know, like Tesla, SpaceX and Amazon.

It makes you feel like you need to be an Elon Musk level super genius to start a successful online company!

The truth is that straightforward products solving basic problems create fantastic business opportunities. In fact, a lot of businesses are successful because they KEEP...IT...SIMPLE.

That's why we're going to start analyzing some simple businesses to show that you can succeed through simplicity too! If that feeling of "I can do this!" sinks in, you'll finally take action on your own ideas to break through the crippling wantrepreneur phase.

If you want to make money, you gotta sell something. And that means creating a product of your own. We call this creating a value based business and it's a simple proposition. However, the suggestion to create your own product probably causes a feeling of resistance inside you.

"Isn't creating your own product too difficult?"

"What if I'm not good enough to teach something in an info product or offer a service?"

"And stuff like payment processing and memberships and all that? Isn't that too complicated?"

If various gurus and the ever-passing parade of online marketing trends is to be believed, there are far easier ways to make money. So, why should you go the path of (seemingly) greater resistance and get your hands dirty creating your own product?

That didn’t help so...you lowered it again. Each time, you got nothing but crickets.

But if your pricing isn’t the problem, what is?

Perhaps it’s the content, language and value of your offer instead. Changing price is easy, but optimizing these 3 elements isn't. They need to be dialed in before your target market will even take notice.

In our first weekly installment of ActiveGrowth’s new newsletter, The Silver Bulletin, we’re going to show you one way to get inside the mind your target audience to find out what they actually need instead of what people say they want.

So, you have this idea for a business or maybe a new niche to enter. This is perhaps the most crucial moment of the entire project: what you do now will determine whether you dive head-first into a world of pain or whether you'll be taking the first steps towards a thriving new business.

Watch the video below to see the simple approach I use to validate any new business idea in any market.​

Some of the web’s most successful businesses swear by the lean startup method. I’ve also personally used this method and I’ve written about minimum viable products as one of the pillars of successfully starting an online business.

In a nutshell, the idea is to create the smallest possible version of a product, release it and then grow the product based on user feedback. This is an idea completely opposed to the usual approach of building the “perfect” product first and only then releasing it to the public.

Creating a minimum viable product is amazingly useful, will make your business more prosperous and yourself more attractive and intelligent… BUT what if your product isn’t suitable for this model?

If you want to build an amazing, huge business that will change the world, you should start by selling an ebook on a simple, single-column sales page.

That might seem like strange advice, but watch the video below to see how starting with something simple has several benefits (including ones I bet you didn’t think of) and how you can use it as a “skill builder”:

Picture this: you’ve come up with an idea for a new product or service (or any kind of value based business) and you’ve decided you’ll create a minimum viable product so you can test your idea against the real world market as quickly as possible. Perhaps you create an information product, like I recommended in a previous post.

You’ve kept costs and time investment low, thus minimizing risk. So, the worst that could happen is that no one’s interested and you move on to the next thing, right?

According to one of our readers, there’s a far worse possible outcome: you could get stuck in Pivot Limbo… forever (que dramatic music). Read on to discover what Pivot Limbo is and how to escape…

I have written about many different aspects of creating and successfully selling products, the foundation of any value based business.

As announced in an earlier video, my goal is to provide you with all the information you need to create your own value based business successfully. So far, I’ve done so in many separate parts (and I’ll reference many of them throughout this post). In this post, I want to provide the big picture. I want to show you the entire system, from start to finish.